


Sundown, Holiday, and Beacon

by luninosity



Series: Superhero Polyamory Fluff [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Comfort Sex, Dom/sub, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, Explicit Sexual Content, Fluff and Angst, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Love, M/M, Minor Injuries, Multi, Polyamory, Porn with Feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-17
Updated: 2018-03-20
Packaged: 2019-04-01 10:03:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13995936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity
Summary: The Sinister Sorcerer’s cape caught the wind. Fluttered. Wreathed his flying form with imposing eerie green. His laugh rattled buildings and sent a matching shiver down Ryan’s spine. They hovered across from the Golden Gate Bridge and watched each other, trapped in a mutual mid-air stand-off.The Sorcerer waved a hand. Stormclouds gathered. Rain pelted the world. A screech of threatened metal rose up from below.“Don’t you dare,” Ryan said, “there’re people on that bridge—” and caught his balance amid wind and pointed a finger. Lightning flashed. Electric as his name.“Ow,” Holiday Jones said, and jerked a foot out of the way, and glared at him. “You’re not supposed toactuallyshoot me!”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kellyscams](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kellyscams/gifts).



> One more original thing! In theory this is for an anthology of poly romance stories, assuming I finish it on time and they accept it.
> 
> Chapter two will have ALL the porn. I promise. :D

The Sinister Sorcerer’s cape caught the wind. Fluttered. Wreathed his flying form with imposing eerie green. His laugh rattled buildings and sent a matching shiver down Ryan’s spine. They hovered across from the Golden Gate Bridge and watched each other, trapped in a mutual mid-air stand-off.

The Sorcerer waved a hand. Stormclouds gathered. Rain pelted the world. A screech of threatened metal rose up from below.

“Don’t you dare,” Ryan said, “there’re people on that bridge—” and caught his balance amid wind and pointed a finger. Lightning flashed. Electric as his name.

“Ow,” Holiday Jones said, and jerked a foot out of the way, and glared at him. “You’re not supposed to _actually_ shoot me!”

“It’s verisimilitude!”

“Big words from a former bloody sidekick flying child—”

“Getting a little _too_ into the role, aren’t you, did you forget who tied you up yesterday—”

“Both of you behave,” said John’s calm voice across their earpieces, “or no one’s getting to tie anyone up tonight. Holly, menace people without hurting them, please. Ryan, don’t shoot Holly in the foot, that’s either obviously purposeful or ridiculously awful bad aim. And let’s wrap this up soon, because the other Masters of Terror are starting to wonder whether they should leave the Terrible Tower and help, and I’m not out there to even the odds.”

“Sorry,” Holly said immediately. He even visibly meant it. Sincerity behind the curling green and silver of his mask. In that elegant British accent. In those big anxious hazel eyes. Perilously close to dropping the whole supervillain persona that kept them informed about the Masters of Terror and secret plans to be foiled. “Never mind, Ryan, you can shoot me, it’s fine, I heal fast—”

“I’m not going to seriously shoot you! I love you, you moron.” Ryan considered this phrasing, added, “You know what I mean. Sorry, John. And I love you too.” The rain got into his hair. Flattened it in black spikes over his face and the corner of his mask.

Electric powers couldn’t do much about that. He spared a second to glare at Holly, who was managing to float serenely between raindrops and stay dry. _Definitely_ a Sinister Sorcerer. Charming his personal weather.

“You’re both idiots,” John said, “but you’re my idiots. I’m making lasagna for dinner. We could all use the comfort after this. Ryan, shoot Holly, please.”

“I’m not—” An invisible hand, courtesy of one of Holly’s mystic rings of power, flipped him upside down. The hand dangled him over rain-pummeled waters, out above the bay. This was not a good feeling. “Thank you _very_ much, now I feel _extra_ menaced—”

“I do have a plan,” John observed. “If you both would shut up and accept the benefit of my age and wisdom. Holiday, you’re supposed to be attacking the bridge and demonstrating your utter rage at the foolish complacency of humanity, not wasting time on a former sidekick who should be beneath your notice—sorry, Ryan, you know I don’t mean that—”

“I know,” Ryan said, doing a flip back upright with the aid of a lightning-bolt and momentum. The reminder would’ve stung, and from someone else it still would, but he knew John trusted him. In his bones. In his soul. “And also, for the record, your age and wisdom got you stuck at home recovering from a lungful of Doctor Dread’s poison compound. Are you using the inhaler we got you from Moon Labs? Go lie down. Don’t make dinner. We can pick something up.” Holly had started throwing cars off the bridge, being careful to select only the abandoned ones. Fleeing citizens, not privy to this information, shrieked and scurried and dropped belongings.

“I’ve got a blanket. _And_ the inhaler. I’m fine. —Holly, your fatal weakness is your arrogance, right? You’re thinking you’ve disposed of Beacon for good. The _old_ Lightning Kid. Easy. Not a challenge. You can turn your back on him. Ryan, speaking of, go shoot Holly in the back.”

“I’m not _that_ much of a dick!” Ryan said.

“I really don’t mind,” Holly said, which made both his partners wince. Ryan didn’t have to say anything to know that John would be having the exact same thoughts: as much as they all three enjoyed Holly’s sweetly submissive and genuinely masochistic tendencies in bed, there was a line that got unhealthy, and that line hovered right around the need to keep on proving himself and his own redemption via martyrdom. “I’d trust you not to hit anything vital, and we’ve got to make it convincing, haven’t we—”

“Holiday,” John said, “I didn’t mean you couldn’t put up a personal force field as a shield!”

“Oh. Right.”

“Tell me when,” Ryan said, sneaking up around a bridge pylon. He wanted good footing for this; he didn’t want to miss. When he landed his boot slipped briefly on rain-slick metal; he grabbed a piece of bridge and held on.

John paused to cough. Ryan and Holly paused to worry.

Down below, a few civilians pointed and called out his name. Beacon. Their superhero, or at least half the local team. Electricity and flight and light in the darkness. Metaphoric and literal.

Normally John would’ve been out here with him. Much better at crowd control. Big and kind and comforting. Super-soldier strength and minor telepathic illusions, which was always nice for dealing with magical threats or facades thereof. John Trent, aka Sundown, had been a recognizable force for good for over fifteen years. People tended to like him.

Of course, normally John hadn’t run into a poison-filled trap in order to defuse a deadly bioweapon three days before. Self-sacrificial idiot. Giant martyr. All muscles and good intentions. Ryan adored him.

He said, “If you don’t sound any better by tomorrow I’m calling my mother.”

“Come on, last time your mother threatened to sedate me for a week, that’s not fair—”

“You had two broken legs!” Ryan’s mother adored John, too. Both his parents did; both Doctors Yamamoto, the physicist and the trauma surgeon, had immediately adopted their son’s partner and enveloped him in love and expensive holiday gifts and cooking of his favorite foods. They fussed over John’s birthday and the anniversary of his first partner’s death; if they knew John was unwell they’d show up at Clifftop armed with medical knowledge, laboratory supplies, and at least three kinds of soup.

Ryan occasionally suspected his parents liked John better than their own child. All that old-fashioned respectful politeness. Irresistible.

As he himself knew all too well. Head over heels, right from the start. That first-ever leap into side-by-side battle. Taking down a robot army, falling in love.

“I can still shoot with broken legs,” John argued. “Which you need to do. Soon, please, there’s chatter happening on the radio.”

“I’ll go and be theatrical at people,” Holly said. “Not paying attention.” His cape rippled majestically. His mask caught storm-light and glinted. His rings hummed; he spread his arms and descended toward huddled humans.

Ryan couldn’t not roll his eyes.

Holiday Fortune Lyndsay Jones, the last surviving Sinister Sorcerer, gestured grandly at his audience. Intoned, switching to the external channel, “You are naught but earthworms before the power of magic! Tremble before your rightful leader! Quake upon the sight of true power! Kneel!”

“Earthworms?” Ryan said.

“He’s having fun,” John said. “You know he loves Shakespeare. Though I’m not sure about the earthworms, either.”

“Would you hurry up,” Holly said, switching back, “I can only shout at them for so long before they realize I’m not in fact going to harm anyone.”

Ryan shoved wet hair out of his face _again_ , made a mental note to ask whether his father could do something about a weatherproof cowl, and lifted a hand. “Got shields?”

“Yes, Ryan,” Holly said.

Thunder clamored. Waves crashed across the bay. The bridge swayed. Ryan jabbed fingers that way, shouted, “We’ll never kneel before you!”—and yes, okay, he was having fun too—and summoned up white-hot electric bolts, arcs that flew from his hand and struck the Sinister Sorcerer squarely between the shoulders.

Holly flung up both arms, staggered, fell to both knees. Tried to get up. Fell back onto the bridge. Waved a feeble hand and made faint shimmers in the air. “This cannot be!”

“Don’t overact or anything,” John said, laughing, coughing, getting breath back.

Ryan jumped down from the swoop of the bridge. Landed next to him. “Had enough?”

Holly gave him a supercilious glare. Every bit of that aristocratic heritage thrown in. Effective as hell, even on his knees. Maybe especially then; Ryan had an absurd flash of memory: the week before, Holiday Jones on both knees then too, bound in leather and collared and quivering with need, lips parted and wet and plush.

Holly announced, “Never, hero!” and tried to open a hole in the bridge under Ryan’s feet.

Ryan wrapped lightning around his ankles. Yanked. Knocked him sprawling. “How about now?” Privately, he added, “You okay?”

“Fine. You know how much I love it when you’re rough with me.” Those sunlit forest-path eyes sparkled. “I mean—you may have vanquished me this day, but we’ll meet again!”

Green and gold streaks spun into a circle. The Sinister Sorcerer’s Mysterium, that den of obscure and wicked secrets, hovered on the other side. Holly moved the Mysterium around on an irregular schedule; at the moment Ryan knew it was hanging out in Canada, near Vancouver, by the bay. Holly liked water and rain.

“Can I go,” Holly said to them, “or should I let myself be thrown around a bit more?”

“No, go on, you’ve already done the big exit line—”

“Your days of heroism are numbered, Beacon!” Holly said over him, and jumped to both feet and dove through the portal in a flare of jade and tourmaline light. He somehow managed to make even retreat appear as weightless as a cloud.

He left the rain pouring down. Ryan, standing on the bridge and dripping wet, sighed.

The civilians gazed at him. One or two cautiously applauded. Ragged cheers ventured up. A few people peeked down at their cars, floating in the bay, in dismay.

“That’s _our_ Lightning Kid!” someone said. Someone else said, “No, he goes by Beacon now, remember, hooray for Beacon!”

Ryan gritted teeth, felt water squish inside his left boot, and gave them all a halfhearted not-exactly-salute. Then gathered up electric threads of life, felt the humming of the world in his hands, and launched himself back into the air.

Several hands waved as he passed overhead. John set down a mug of tea—from the noise, probably on one of the monitor screens—and said, “Hey, at least they remembered.”

“I hate people.”

“No you don’t. You rescue people, Beacon.”

“I’m the one who’s supposed to hate people,” Holly put in. He must’ve arrived at the Mysterium safely, then; Ryan could picture him, slim and lovely and smiling under a shoved-up wild mask. “You’re the hero. Heroes. Both of you.”

“I’m thinking about a name change. I sound like a lighthouse.” He stretched out senses, rode currents, felt the crackle of life as it sang through his body. He raced Holly’s stupid storm toward Clifftop; he thought he’d win.

“You don’t want to go through five names in two years,” John said. “No one’ll be able to keep track. Looks like everyone’s fine, by the way, no casualties, nothing worse than a few skinned knees and bruises. Nicely handled.”

“As long as we were convincing.” The cliffs of Clifftop loomed up and beckoned him in, green and grey and foggy, to the average gaze uninhabited. The island sat unplotted and unmapped out in the Pacific Ocean, not too distant from the coast of California. It’d been John’s base first, back when he and Robbie Rivers had stood side by side and hand in hand and carved it out of stone.

Ryan had only met Robbie once. He’d been a lot younger, the Lightning Kid tagging along with heroes; they’d been finishing some mop-up work, collecting tiny resurrected dinosaurs before New York City could be overrun. After locking away a mad scientist or two, both Sundown and Mercury had dropped by to talk to Captain Justice. They’d stood framed in sunlight like legends, made of square jaws and straight shoulders and matching military bearing; John’s fawn-brown hair and pale grey eyes had been a perfect dark mirror of Robbie’s brilliant gold and sapphire blue. They’d laughed, and made jokes with Tim about the Captain Justice uniform, and shaken hands. They’d held press conferences. They’d saved the world with confidence and dazzling smiles, and kissed each other in public and made jokes about that too, how they’d always known, from Army basic training to voluntary top-secret experiments to fighting baby lizard monsters, nothing ever coming between them.

Robbie Rivers, despite golden strength and telekinetic powers and shining laughter, had died preventing a stolen nuclear weapon from taking out half the planet. John, locked in hand-to-hand battle with the mastermind responsible for the launch, had heard him die.

Ryan couldn’t even imagine that hearing. Hoped he’d never have to. Knew the risks.

That’d been over a decade ago. John might’ve quit fighting. Might’ve succumbed to vigilante vengeance and gone on a murderous rampage. Hadn’t, because he was John, and had simply thrown himself back into work, tense and devastated and rigidly determined to follow all the rules and take all the villains into custody and save as many lives as he could.

Ryan dove through clouds and a waterfall, wondered why they had so much water and specifically why it kept landing on his head tonight, and slipped through the gossamer ripple of the hidden entrance. Clifftop tucked itself around him: snug and cavernous, sprawling into the mountain but made of curves and friendly rock-falls, artistic and cozy as home.

At the moment home smelled of lasagna and fireplace heat. Ryan grinned, shouted, “We told you not to bother!” and kicked off wet boots in the entrance hall. They tipped over, yellow lightning-designs flopping onto each other.

John yelled back, “Too late, I already did!” and came out from the common room to meet him. Knitted blanket over shoulders. Slight hint of grey in that baby-owl hair. Tall and commanding and present as ever, even wearing sweatpants and a time-worn white shirt with paint on the hem from when they’d refinished the cabinets.

Barefoot, still damp, Ryan put arms around him. Kissed him until they were both breathless and gleeful, leaning into each other, getting tangled in blanket-folds and roaming hands. They didn’t match in height or breadth or expertise the way John and Robbie once had, but that was okay; neither Ryan nor Holly could be Robbie Rivers, and John didn’t need them to be.

John just needed them. And, licking water-drops from Ryan’s throat, said, “Holly?”

“Yes, John,” Holly said, a little too quietly. All of Clifftop was linked into the communications array; he could hear them from anywhere. The fire danced in the common room’s fireplace, nestled into stone and stalwart, warding off the storm.

“Oh, we’re thinking about you, kid. Don’t think we’re not. We want you to listen.”

“We totally do,” Ryan said, arching his back while John played with the zipper on his suit. “We want you thinking about what we’re going to do with you. Right now you can’t do anything about it, all by yourself over there, and we haven’t said you can, but you can imagine, can’t you? You’re listening to us, and you’re not touching yourself at all—oh fuck, _yes_ , that, right there—because you’re being good, aren’t you? For us.”

“So good,” John agreed, hand busy. “The way you want to be, don’t you, kid? Are you getting hard for us? Maybe even getting wet, all dripping and eager, under those fancy costume robes?”

Holly made a small pleading sound across the communications link. “Yes, sir.” Ryan could picture him: standing in the water-cool gleaming light of the Mysterium, framed by black hair and glinting artifacts and rare jewels and focus-stones, trembling and pink-cheeked and wholly theirs and beloved.

“Good,” John said happily, and kissed Ryan one more time, long and luxurious and audible. “You can stay that way. We’ll wait for you.”

“We will?” Ryan said. John laughed.

Of course they would, though; he twined fingers into John’s, appreciated the unfulfilled throb of desire between his thighs, said to Holly, “Of course we will. I need to change, anyway. And shower. You dumped half a ton of water on my head and tried to drop me into a hole.”

“Verisimilitude,” Holly said right back, mischievous and adorable, affection clear as sunbeams underwater, illuminating stories and stones.

“Ridiculous supervillain,” Ryan said, with fondness, “don’t go off and play spy until I get back, I want to talk to you, okay?” and went to shower and change. He did not want John to get more wet; those lungs were still recovering.

The shower felt incredible. Massaging heat. Pebbled floors. Icy rainwater sluicing away down the drain. Holly’s ludicrously expensive apple-scented body wash and John’s ocean-spray cleanness. His own shampoo, light and woodsy and familiar.

He turned his hair into foamy spikes just because. Pondered how he’d look with a new haircut to go with a proposed new name. Caught sight of their collection of shower lube, bottles arranged in tidy formation because they’d each independently remembered to buy more and had come home with three different new brands and John had shrugged and said, “Why not test them all and compare?”

He thought about both his partners. He thought about the crinkles at the corners of John’s eyes and the welcome in that kiss. He thought about Holly’s shyly playful sense of humor, which had emerged gradually over the last two years, as if astonished at its own existence.

Holiday Fortune Lyndsay Jones at the age of twelve, under his parents’ tutelage, had learned to channel and direct metaphysical energy toward any goal they desired. Had leveled his own boarding school, which he’d had painful reasons to resent—Ryan and John had heard those stories, and John had put a fist through solid rock—and later on a few skyscrapers, while Arachne and Horatius Jones applauded proudly. At fifteen, wearing only two of the legendary family focus-stones, had brought down the United World Headquarters building.

He’d been thin and clumsily graceful as a half-grown foal, a boy growing into his limbs, long arms outstretched. He’d walked through rubble, dust billowing away from coltish legs; he’d looked up at his mother and smiled, and she’d taken his hand.

Ryan had seen the video footage. John had been there. Boots on the ground. Combining forces with the Fantastic League and the Sky-Men and everybody else. They’d stopped the Sinister Sorcerers from tearing the world apart, but the family’d gotten away.

Two years after that, they’d returned.

Two years after _that_ , Holly was here. With Ryan, and John, and their future.

And lasagna. And cuddling on their heroically sized couch. And movie nights and popcorn. And spectacular mind-blowing sex. With all the lube.

Ryan tipped his head back, rinsed foam out of his hair, ran a hand idly over his stomach and lower—kind of half-aroused, no plans to do anything about it, but hearing again Holly’s little whimper of frustrated need and feeling himself stir—and got on with the end of his shower. His partners would be waiting.

When he padded back out, having thrown on a faded university-logo shirt—UC Berkeley, because his parents and Tim had collectively insisted on college, and he’d enjoyed himself—and unearthed a not quite matching pair of pajama pants, he followed the sound of voices; John had wandered back to the kitchen and was sitting on a bar stool in deference to weak lungs. He was saying, “—no, look, the _point_ of a garden is to grow our _own_ bell peppers, if you like them—”

“Yes,” Holly said from the Mysterium, “but why wouldn’t I just buy them? Or sort of…pay someone else to grow them? Isn’t that how money works?”

“You don’t know how money works,” Ryan put in, opening the fridge, getting out a beer. Two. “I handle our finances. Because you’re both hopeless.” This was an exaggeration, but not by much. Only one of them possessed an actual business degree, and that one was neither of his partners. Holiday, the product of depressingly blue-blooded supervillain aristocracy, generally regarded money as something that existed when or if needed, simply lying around. John had the opposite problem. Ryan had never figured out how anyone could lose track of an entire savings account, nor why, having done so, John had shrugged and given up and economized.

To be fair, that situation had involved a tangle of government funds and military benefits and Robbie’s will and a messy rat’s nest of economic red tape. Hadn’t been insurmountable, though, and he’d been determined. John had quite a lot of money, these days. Not as much as Holly, but then that was an astronomical amount; in any case it didn’t matter. They were a team. Shared. Together.

Ryan had ended up handling the finances for a few other superheroes, once word got out. He’d started charging for those services, because why the hell not. Might as well have an income.

“We’re not hopeless,” John said. “We know when to listen to someone else’s expertise. We’re good at that.” His inhaler lay on the countertop, a sleek futuristic coil of healing technology. Repairing those lungs.

“But you want to grow vegetables,” Holly said. “Doesn’t that require…I don’t know, dirt? Seeds? Someone to sort of watch over them and feed them?”

“They’re tomatoes, not babies! What do you think vegetables actually _do_?”

“Get eaten!”

“I take it back, you _are_ hopeless—” John smothered a cough in the last sip of his tea. “Ryan, help. He doesn’t know what gardens are.”

“Don’t look at me.” Ryan plopped onto the bar stool next to his. “I have, like, the opposite of a green thumb. Black. Black and poisonous. I electrocute things.”

“I know what gardens are,” Holly protested. “The grounds around the Lyndsay estate have roses, I think, and footpaths, and one or two lily-ponds, and you can go and walk in them, I mean the footpaths not the ponds, or I think you can, I’ve not been there in ages and I said yes to opening up the house to tourists so who knows what’s going on—”

“That’s not a garden! That’s historical trivia!”

“Are you charging an entrance fee for the tourists?” Ryan said. “Because if you are I need to know. Income. Records. Are you?”

“Ah…I can find out? The property manager must know. I’ll ask.”

Ryan pressed the beer bottle against the bridge of his nose for a second. Nice and cool. “Do that, please, and let me know. Consider it an order.”

John patted his shoulder.

“I will,” Holly said. “Sorry, Ryan. I’m trying to get used to this, I really am. I don’t mind us having a garden. I could try to help with, er, feeding it.”

“I don’t think I trust you near my vegetables,” John said. “I mean that in a nice way, kid.”

“But what if I used magic to—”

“You don’t get to use magic on my zucchini!”

“One of you wants to do magic things to a zucchini,” Ryan said, leaning elbows on the counter, “and one of you somehow _doesn’t_ want to find out exactly what that entails. Why does everyone think _I’m_ the dick on this team?” This came out more plaintive than he’d meant it to; it’d been mostly a joke.

“Perhaps because you’ve got a chip on your shoulder the exact size and shape of Captain Justice?” Holly observed, over the communications link.

“Holiday,” John said, not quite a scolding.

“Ah, Tim’s not a problem.” Ryan popped the cap off his beer, then reached over and opened John’s too. “I mean, we’re better off on opposite sides of the country and separate teams, but he was a good teacher, and he’s a decent guy. It’s mostly the media. The whole narrative. Once a kid sidekick—”

“Always a kid sidekick,” his partners finished in unison. John added, “And everyone thinks you’re a dick because of days like today,” and clinked his beer against Ryan’s, amused. “You save people, yeah, but you just zip away. No stopping to say hi to kids, take photos, shake hands. Friendly local hero. All that.”

“I have you for that,” Ryan grumbled. “When you’re not half-dead. Holly, you’re lucky, no one expects a supervillain to kiss babies.”

“I don’t mind babies,” Holly said, amid sounds that suggested he’d begun conjuring a portal. “Not that I’d know what to do with one, but in theory. They’re rather cute. I’m off to the Terrible Tower, then? Since I can’t put it off much longer? They’ll be wondering why I’ve not shown up to sulk at my defeat and have witnesses for a temper-tantrum. Don’t wait for me as far as the lasagna, I’ve no idea how late I’ll be, and you know I’ll have to pop back to the Mysterium first in case anyone’s feeling paranoid and tries to follow me home. Take care of John and feed each other.”

“Wait—” Ryan said, right as John started, “Holly—”

“You first—”

“No, go ahead—”

Magical sizzling quivered in the distance; Holiday waited patiently for his partners to sort themselves out.

“Before you go all radio silent,” Ryan said, “you _are_ okay, right? I didn’t hurt you with that last blast or anything?” The Terrible Tower had every kind of anti-interference protection—technological, mystical, lethal—that the world’s most powerful supervillains could devise. Even Holiday had never been able to transmit anything from inside.

This meant that Holly, being Holly, worried about not being useful enough. Ryan and John worried more about him getting caught or being injured or overexerting his powers, alone among enemies and in pain. They wouldn’t know. They wouldn’t know until too late.

“No, you were marvelous,” Holly said, weary but cheerful. “Not even bruises. Though you can cause some of those later if you’d like. Do you recall that time about a month ago, with the cane and also your electric—”

“We’ll see,” John said firmly, an effect only mildly interrupted by the cough. “After you’re home and safe and you’ve had a chance to eat.”

“We’ll talk about it when you’re here,” Ryan said. “And we’ll talk about your phrasing, too. We _can_ do things to you? Really, kid?”

“Oh,” Holly said. “Ah…sorry, sir. Sirs.” His tone wasn’t, though. Hopeful, instead. “I love you?”

“We love you,” Ryan told him. “Even when you’re a brat on purpose. We’ll decide what you get to have. And you’ll take it. And you’ll enjoy it.”

“Absolutely yes,” Holly agreed. “I’ll try to make this quick. Especially with _that_ to look forward to. Take care of John first, though—” Magic sang through the evening. Gobbled up his last syllable. Cut off the link. Dead air.

No. Not dead. Holly would be fine. Holiday Jones carried legendary family amulets and wielded sorcerous enchantment and winsome charm like elegant blades: graceful, glamorous, powerful. Even out of contact with anyone, even young and recently apparently defeated, even among a nest of criminals and villains and vicious minds, Holly could protect himself.

He’d grown up in that nest, after all.

Ryan nevertheless reached out to hold John’s hand. John held his right back. Their partner, their other third, their matching balance-point, had stepped into danger. Every atom of both their hearts screamed to follow.

“He’ll be okay,” John said.

“I know.”

“He always is.”

“I know.”

“He’ll be…”

“Yeah.” He looked up, found John looking at him. Their eyes met. “I know.”

“I hate this,” John said, and scrubbed his other hand over his face. “I hate it.”

“I know,” Ryan said again, and slid off his own bar stool and put arms around him. “Me too.”

John leaned into him. Holding on. Head tucked down, face hidden, small and younger and scared, for all that he was years older and significantly heavier. “I don’t know how much longer I can do this. I can’t lose him. I can’t lose you. I can’t. Not—” His voice cracked; he stopped.

Not again, Ryan thought. He rubbed John’s back, through the blanket. “Yeah. Kinda how we feel when you run into a room full of poison gas. You got accelerated healing, not instant.”

“There wasn’t _time_ —”

“Oh, I know. We’d’ve done it. Well, I would’ve. Holly totally would’ve waved some enchanted amulet around and talked your gas into being harmless. Batted those eyelashes at it.” Holly had in fact been secretly sabotaging Code Blue’s apocalypse machine in Antarctica. No one suspected him, not as far as they knew. The Masters of Terror were convinced that he’d grown up a lovely spoiled brat with enough inherited power to be a decent villain but no gift for strategy at all.

“He does have very persuasive eyelashes,” John said into his shoulder. “All soft and long and pretty. Maybe it’s another superpower.”

“It so is. Part of the whole magic adorable sorcerer thing. Honestly, though…” He pulled back enough to see John’s face, to meet that emotion with his own. “If you want, we can talk to him about it. When he gets here. Stopping this whole infiltration play. I’ve been thinking about it too.”

“You have?” John’s voice wobbled for a slightly different reason this time. Relief, a reprieve, hope. They’d found themselves thinking alike almost from the first: not exactly the same, and not on every subject, but on big ones. And this one was damn big. Massive. Boulders formed out of love.

“It’s been almost two years. He’s done enough. He’ll say he hasn’t, but he’ll listen to us.” And every day, every week, every month, held more chances of discovery. More potential for slip-ups, exhaustion, or simply some other villain’s paranoia uncovering the person who’d been passing along information. “I think it’s time.”

John nodded, coughed, grabbed the inhaler, nodded again. “Yeah.”

Two years ago they’d been in London. That’d been their first big mission together, facing a threat on a global scale. A definite jump up from pranks turned deadly and bank robbers with ice-shooting weaponry.

He and John had only been partners, in all senses of the word, for three months. Still getting used to each other. Working out shorthand. Learning when to look or leap. John had said once that he’d not expected to fall in love with anyone, not planning to, thinking about the next mission and going home alone and going out again; and then he’d locked eyes with Captain Justice’s electric young former partner, all sparks and passion and a fierce need to prove himself, across the barrel of an adversary’s icicle gun. That’d been that. Defenses down. Taken out.

That’d been the year Arachne and Horatius Jones had tried to pull down the moon, to cause an extinction-level event, to preserve only their chosen people in a mystically secured safe-house. Holiday Fortune Lyndsay Jones at seventeen years old, guarding his parents’ backs, had quite possibly been the most beautiful person on the planet. He’d dressed up for the occasion in black and green, highlighting those huge hazel eyes, and he’d moved like an adder, slender and sophisticated and deadly.

Ryan had been present, that time. Everyone had. The Fantastic League. Captain Justice and the brand-new Lightning Kid, a girl named Melissa who was literally full of bouncing energy and much younger than Ryan remembered ever being. John had been in full tactical Sundown gear. Ryan had tried not to get distracted by those shoulders and all the straps and buckles on that suit. Later. Once they made it out.

Holiday had been playing barricade, throwing buses and buildings around the middle of London’s Trafalgar Square. His parents had held up their own amulets. Had murmured spells, rituals, words that shook the universe out of true.

Rescue efforts had diverted most of the heroes. Holiday Jones had plainly known this. He’d kept trapping people, never outright killing them. Burning buildings. Falling rubble. Exploding gas lines. Requiring more and more thinning of the heroic ranks.

He’d been very good, but still just one boy. Captain Justice had nearly made it to his parents. Holiday, whirling that way, had flung a double-decker tour bus at him.

The bus had crashed down. Rolled. Lurched toward a small civilian child. Who tripped, screamed, couldn’t seem to get up.

The child’s mother had screamed too, human and anguished. Had run back, heading for flames and devastation. Would never have made it through.

Holiday Jones had seen it too. That lovely face had registered a split second’s worth of shock. Of realization. Of _knowing_ , maybe for the first time, that a boy and his mother could die together here and now, visible and undeniable, and it’d be his fault—

He’d flung a hand out. Yanked at some invisible thread. Propelled the boy toward himself. Away from the fiery crash.

A shot had hit him, then.

Not from one of the heroes. A stray bullet. Some military officer’s panicked reaction. Holly hadn’t been paying enough attention to his own shields. The impact plunged right through his stomach.

Ryan, trying to absorb dazzling electricity from snapping power lines and also watch John’s back while his partner got schoolkids to cover, had blurted out “No—” involuntarily.

Like watching artwork die. Like watching a symphony fall to both knees when it’d only just learned that it didn’t really want to hurt children.

The boy Holly’d been trying to save hadn’t moved. Fire scorched the sky. The moon creaked lower, blotting out day.

John had sized up the danger, had bolted that way, had made a dive into flames for the kid’s limp form. Holiday Jones, on both knees, pressed a hand to his stomach. The hand turned red. He could heal; Ryan knew he could. The entire Jones family could.

Captain Justice, no longer encumbered by the defensive perimeter, was busy wading into the ritual. Fists and feet. Heroics in action.

Arachne Jones had shouted _Help us!_ to her son. Holly, hands wet with blood, had half-turned and half-fallen, collapsing to the ground.

 _We need your power!_ she’d demanded. _Your strength added to ours! Now!_

Holly, eyes stunned, face ghost-white, had stared back. His lips had moved; Ryan hadn’t been able to read them, but could guess. If Holiday stopped using his power on himself he’d die. Surely his mother couldn’t want that.

She’d shouted words. An honor. Your duty. Your sacrifice. The glorious new beginning.

John, stumbling and fire-singed, had run out of smoke with the boy in his arms. Had found the very human mother, who wept and clutched her son, who was breathing.

Holiday Jones had seen that too.

Primrose and celadon light had blossomed around him. With a last gasp of strength, he’d let himself fall through the portal, into wherever he’d opened it, with as much strength as he had.

Arachne had shrieked. The foundations of the world had frozen, broken rubble astounded mid-fall: everyone and everything caught out of time, abandoned and furious.

Arachne and Horatius Jones had chosen to die together. To immolate themselves and their plans in a bloody tower of flame, rather than be captured by the world’s superheroes. No one knew what they might’ve said to their son; their bodies had been found entwined as the fires ebbed.

Slowly, crumbled block by crumbled block, they’d all gotten on with reassembling and defending London and the rest of the world. Ryan and John had worked shoulder to shoulder with rescue crews, aching and sore, helping where they could.

At night, during the nights, they’d had a different project. They hadn’t even paused to debate it. They’d both seen Holiday’s face.

John had been the one who’d found him, after three days of painstaking triangulation, tracking of mystic amulet signatures, and combat-honed estimation of how far he’d make it. Holiday had in fact landed in an old derelict sheep-farmer’s cottage, someplace that’d been emptied out for a good century at Ryan’s best guess. His parents’ amulets and rings had all landed with him, following the heir to the family power; with this mystical help, he was still alive, but only barely. He hadn’t eaten or bathed or possibly even moved for seventy-two hours. Feverish and kitten-weak, he remained the most breathtaking person Ryan had ever seen, that black hair falling like a sword-slash across his face.

He’d whispered, _did he make it?_

They’d traded glances. John had asked whether this meant Holiday’s father.

 _No,_ Holly had said, blood-splashed and shivering. _The boy. The one you went back for—the one I tried to—I didn’t mean—is he safe? Or if—is there anything I can do, please tell me, is he all right, can I try to help?_

Two years later, Ryan thought maybe he’d fallen in love with Holiday Fortune Lyndsay Jones right then. Maybe both he and John had.

They hadn’t turned Holly in. They’d taken him home. To Clifftop. _Their_ home.

And now they sent him into danger. Over and over. Never mind that Holly’d volunteered; it’d been his own idea. A way of making amends. Making use of expectations.

John sat up, gulped down half his beer, held Ryan’s hand. “He’ll need tea. When he gets here. Something warm. I could make that banana-walnut bread. He likes that one.”

“Do we have bananas? Also, you’re resting. Worrying about baked goods isn’t resting.”

“We have bananas. I _am_ resting.” But he let Ryan scoop him up from the bar stool and steer him over to couch-cushions despite this. They flopped down together, feet up, letting the sofa take some weight. Ryan pointedly dropped the inhaler on John’s chest. John made a face at him. Coughed. Used it.

By unspoken agreement they knew they’d wait for Holly for dinner. The lasagna concurred, beaming through tomato sauce and oven-heat.

John flipped on the television. Some sort of home renovation show. Remodeling a century-old farmhouse. Taking down walls. Some kind of metaphor, Ryan thought, for freedom: for the decision they might’ve just made.

He said, “We could totally start a home remodeling company. Super-strength, installing electricity, disposing of hazardous materials. Holly can be the charming salesperson who actually talks to clients. You know, whenever we quit the hero business.”

“I was thinking about bookshelves,” John said. “Built-ins, I mean, floor to ceiling, on the wall over there. He’s got all those books, and if he’s going to officially openly move in, the books’ll move too.”

“We can manage bookshelves. We’re heroes. Just tell me what to do, Colonel Trent, sir.”

John snorted. Elbowed him in the side. “I was out of the Army before I’d ever met you, and that promotion was honorary even before that. Never felt right. And you don’t take orders from me.”

“Not that you didn’t deserve the honors.” Ryan knocked a foot against his. “But yeah, kinda over taking orders from people. Unless it’s you and you know more about bookshelves than I do. Are they putting in a skylight? Can we do that?”

“Um…maybe. That’s a lot of rock to get through, overhead. And it might be conspicuous. And—oh, come on, that’s the world’s ugliest wallpaper, why would you pick that?”

“Why is that tile _pink_?”

The fire danced, contented and coruscating. Rock walls caught light and glowed darkly. Italian spice and cheese suffused the air. Rain pattered down across the tall lookout windows, ribboning over glass, mingling with ocean. John’s muscles felt nice to lean into, strong and present and alive. Ryan nursed his own beer, thought distantly about bookshelves and surprises for Holly, tried not to fret about time and lateness. John would be having those thoughts too.

They couldn’t do anything. They had to wait. They had to trust that Holiday would turn up, smiling, shaking long black hair out of his eyes. He always did; he would again, this time, this last time, because it needed to be the last time, or at least close to that. If anything outright apocalyptic was brewing they might need him inside. But if not, if not, he could come home. He could stay.

They all needed that.

After a while John got up to do something enigmatic involving garlic bread and his mother’s seasoning. Ryan got up too, got out Holly’s teakettle, regarded it hopefully. Maybe if he made tea their third partner’d be summoned back. Conjured up through the storm. Beckoned by flavors of bergamot and orange.

John finished communing with the garlic bread, adjusted the timer, turned. “He should be back by now.”

“It’ll take as long as it takes. And he’ll be talking to people. Finding out plans. Whatever they’ll tell him.” He was thinking the same, though. The not knowing ate into his heart. Acid on his bones. His soul. “You know he’ll try to pick up as much as he can.”

“He always tries—” John’s hands clenched briefly around the counter’s edge, and let go. “I think we need—if he’s up for it, I want to put him back on his knees. Or get out the cane. Or something. I don’t know yet. But—”

“So he can feel it,” Ryan said. “So we can feel it. That he’s here, and this is real, and he’s—”

Pale gold iridesced into a portal. Aureate streamers flared and faded. The television became a backdrop as Holiday arrived out of thin air.

Clifftop’s mystical protections let him in without concern and with welcome; he’d reinforced them. He’d offered, back then, to lock himself out. To require approval from one of the resident heroes.

John had dropped a kiss on his forehead and said, “No, sorry, kid, we want you here.” Ryan had said, “Bring that up again and we’ll, um, not spank you, you like that too much. Put you on your knees in the corner all night, maybe. And no, you idiot, we trust you.” Holly’s smile had started small and shaky, but had become more certain of itself, taking this in.

In the present he was smiling too, but tiredly. He’d left on just two of those mystic focus-stone rings and had changed out of melodramatic robes, having dropped back into his erstwhile lair to shake any pursuit; he’d thrown on an oversized knit sweater in pale sunrise hues and soft-looking loose pants, because Holiday Jones had in part spent the last two years discovering a bashful enjoyment of gentle colors and comfort and a lack of sharp edges.

He’d pulled the explosion of hair into a messy over-one-shoulder braid that was promptly undoing itself. When he took a step out of magic and into the common room, he winced; when he turned the smile their way, Ryan’s heart skipped several beats.

He dropped his near-empty beer bottle onto the counter. Ran.

“I’m fine,” Holly said, but too weakly to be a good denial. “It’s already healing—”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Time for all the porn-with-emotions! Note the rating change. 
> 
> The song for this one is, appropriately, Better Than Ezra's "Happy Endings."

“Did I do any of this?” He hadn’t thought so. But red lay in a vicious line across that aristocratic cheek, splitting fair skin, starting just beneath that wide left eye. More red peeked out at the edge of his collarbone: another thin cruel slash. Holiday Jones, the only Sinister Sorcerer left alive, did possess a gift for swift self-repair, and the cuts were closing themselves as he watched. But they remained present. Which meant they’d been bad. “I didn’t mean to—how bad is it?”

John came over too, bringing a medical kit and better equilibrium. “It wasn’t you, Ryan. That’s a blade, not a burn. How serious is it, kid? Anyplace that hurts worse than others, or feels numb, or like it shouldn’t?”

“No. Or—well—it hurts quite a lot, and there’re holes in that costume now, but it’s only—ow—the usual affection of my colleagues.” Holly’s chin trembled a fraction, though. Ryan found himself forcibly reminded of the years between them, in a way he mostly wasn’t; Holly, at nineteen, was nine years younger than his own twenty-eight, and twenty-five years younger than John.

Of course, Holiday Jones had never been precisely young. Or if so, only in time. Not in terms of experience. Not in terms of innocence. Not with that upbringing.

He shoved down the familiar spike of anger—at Holly’s twisted and manipulative parents, at the casual brutality of the other Masters of Terror, at himself and John for allowing Holiday to do this at all—and heaped mental bars atop it. Not the time, not when their youngest partner needed care and cherishing and affection. “What happened?”

“Killblade.” Holly held willingly still. Let Ryan’s fingers trace the edges of the cut across that cheek: trusting him to cause no further harm. “Those, er, blades. Very pointed. I can never figure out whether he’s attempting to threaten me or seduce me. I know he thinks I’m pretty but incompetent. All of them do.”

“Well, they’re idiots,” John said reasonably, and offered bandages and curative salve when Ryan held out a hand for them. “You’re better than everyone in that room. Hell, you’re a better hero than we are. I got benched today and Ryan got to come home and have a beer and you went over there and put on a show for a room full of monsters. You’re the best of us, kid.”

Ryan, trying not to feel extra-guilty—himself knocking Holly over on the bridge likely hadn’t helped—nodded in agreement. Smoothed tender green salve across that wounded cheek.

“I know you think so.” Holly shut both eyes, flinched as the motion pulled at injuries, reopened them. A smudge of unremoved theatrical eyeliner lurked around the left one. He did not look at either John or Ryan, focusing somewhere around John’s right foot, or possibly the tangle of lines beyond that, where Clifftop’s rock wall made friends with the floor. “I know you tell me so. I just…I’m sorry. I wish I could do more. I wish I could be…if I’d known about Doctor Dread beforehand, you’d not’ve been hurt, and I…but they won’t tell me everything if I’ve not earned it, and I can’t earn it if I don’t do something that genuinely hurts people, and I know I’m not doing enough for you…”

Ryan and John exchanged glances. More serious than they’d thought; not physical, but emotional. Internal bleeding. Old heart-deep stab-wounds, opened up and leaving chasms.

“They brought up your parents,” John said gently, putting an arm around him, drawing him over to the sofa, “didn’t they? No, lie down, let us look at these, I know you’re healing but we want to help.”

“Blade,” Holly said, “and Glitterbomb, and a few others. They said—they said my parents would be so disappointed. I’m a disgrace. I’m not worthy of—and I know, I know, my parents destroyed a whole city and nearly the Moon, not precisely a good standard to live up to, but—but if I can’t be that, but then I can’t help _you_ enough, either, and—”

“What the hell kind of supervillain name is Glitterbomb, anyway,” Ryan said, hands coming to rest over pale exposed skin, next to a new bandage, below Holly’s pushed-up sweater. His fingers wore smears of salve, mint-green and cool, kind as leaves and aloe and sweet grass. “Anywhere else? Did anyone touch you? Anything we should know?” Holly’d said _seduce_ , about Blade. “Anything at all.”

“Oh…um, the Legion of Destruction is planning to kidnap the President at his speech next week and hold him hostage until everyone on their list of supervillain detainees is released. There’s going to be a coordinated series of international bank robberies sometime soon, once they all agree on the dates. And Killblade has plans to attack Captain Justice at the commemorative statue unveiling—”

“That’s not what I meant.” He cleaned off his fingers on Holly’s hip—might as well leave salve over that fading bruise, which achingly hinted at a recent push into a door or wall—and took the closest hand. He’d ended up kneeling on the floor, while Holly’d obediently lain down and accepted care, head in John’s lap. John was playing with his hair, unweaving the clumsy braid, letting dark waves fall free. “And Tim can handle himself. We’ll give him the heads-up, and he’ll get all earnest and grateful and say thank you, but.” He squeezed that hand. Hard. “I meant anything about you.”

“Glitterbomb is a perfect supervillain name,” John threw in, “I mean, I’d hate it, wouldn’t you?” and tapped Holly’s nose with a finger. “You _know_ we meant you, kid. You’d tell us if—if someone really hurt you, yeah?”

“I—” Holly said. “I don’t know why you—yes, I mean, yes. I would. I think I would. I only—I feel—you’re _already_ hurt and I—”

“It’s my own damn fault for not getting out of there quick enough.” John sighed. “Holiday, kid, we’ll tell you again. As many times as you need. We love you. It’ll hurt us if you get hurt. Even more if you don’t tell us. We’re here for you. Like you’re here for us. Let us be here.”

“There’s nothing you can do,” Ryan said, “that’ll scare us away. We swear. Come on, we know you don’t know how to do laundry without turning everyone’s socks pink, and we’ve seen you before you’ve had tea in the morning, and your hair gets into the shower drain, and we love you anyway.”

“I can try to learn to do laundry,” Holly said, but he looked happier.

“I _like_ doing laundry,” John said. “You both think I’m the weird one, I know, but it’s satisfying. Don’t tell me you don’t like clean towels. Holly—”

“I’m okay,” Holly said. “I promise. If they—if anything else happened I’d tell you. I know you’d want to know. And I—I’d want to. To tell you. I love you. I’m only a bit…off-balance, I think. Is that—can we—can I ask for—”

“Of course you can.” John took the hand out of his hair, touched his cheek, slid the hand lower: until big combat-trained fingers and palm rested over Holly’s throat, loosely encircling. Not a threat, but a weight and a reminder, a firmness and control. “We would’ve anyway. For you, for us, what you need, what we want. You’re still ours, kid.”

Holly shut both eyes again. Opened them. Gazed up at John, over at Ryan. His voice, when he answered, came out more hushed, grateful to be understood, already half-dreaming. “Yours. Please.”

“That’s right,” Ryan said. “Good.” Those blasphemous slices of pink were dwindling. Holly wouldn’t have scars; he never did. “You feel up to food, or you want us to take care of you first?”

Holly found a smile, which meant he was feeling better. “I get a choice?”

“You always do.”

“I know,” Holly said. “I was teasing you. You waited for me, didn’t you? For dinner. You didn’t have to. You both need energy.”

“We’re fine.” John rubbed a thumb over his throat, small circles, emphasis. “You could use that, too. Putting yourself back together. Come on, we’ll feed you, and you can think about what we’re going to do to you after.”

“Oh,” Holly said. “Yes, please. I do like you making me wait.”

“We know,” Ryan agreed, and kept a hand around his wrist, getting up. Holly’s lips parted, an inaudible breath.

They hadn’t fallen into that dynamic immediately, though it hadn’t taken long. The undercurrents’d been present from the start: drifting unremarked, coaxing them on.

Holiday had spent the first few weeks recovering, after they’d brought him home; once he’d been up and gingerly mobile, they’d found out that under all the arrogance and the unthinking privilege hid a boy who loved Shakespeare and liked strawberry jam. Who offered tentatively to help with the dishes and to monitor communications when Ryan and John got called to handle the Snake Charmer’s ophidian minions. Who, not yet eighteen and faced with the loss of his parents and every belief he’d once held about their love and their cause, swallowed hard and picked up broken pieces and kept on trying to fit them back together, to learn, to figure out how to be good.

Holiday Jones had always wanted to be good for someone. His parents. His tutors. His instructors in everything from magical channeling to swordplay to seduction. He opened up like a flower at the slightest hint of honest praise, and got embarrassed about his own enthusiasm for _Much Ado About Nothing_. Ryan, who’d known about his own bedroom inclinations after a few interesting encounters during and after college, in part involving a few supervillains with bondage-related tricks, nevertheless had been astounded at the strength of his instinctive response: putting a hand casually on Holly’s shoulder, giving him instructions to follow, telling him he’d done well. Holly flushed pink and pretty every time, and did as instructed.

Ryan, shaken by this, had said as much to John one night. Holly, still recuperating and easily worn out, had gone to sleep early, in the guest rooms that’d become his. He’d gone, in fact, after Ryan had caught him valiantly pretending to be awake during movie night—Holly had never seen _Star Wars_ , which was a crime against cinema and science fiction history—and had told him to go to bed. Holly had started to protest; Ryan had leaned over and put a finger over his lips, and Holly had stopped talking and gazed at him with huge hazel eyes and unmistakable arousal.

Ryan had felt it too. Physical, emotional, a spear of gold to the gut. John’s arm over his shoulders, and Holiday Jones’ breath against his index finger.

He and John tended to switch, in bed; depended on the day, the mood, who felt like what, who needed which role, if any at all. John hadn’t played with kink much but was a quick study and impressively strong and good at responding to a partner’s needs; he wasn’t quite comfortable with causing pain or humiliation even in a good way, preferring caretaking and gentle control of a scene, but he could tie a damn good knot and he knew how to issue military-style orders. They did not keep secrets; in the months since they’d become lovers, they never had.

They trusted each other with their lives and their hearts, which had been why Ryan, shutting the bedroom door behind them, had said, “Holiday—I mean, tonight, that was—”

John had sat down hard on the bed. Answered, “Me too.”

“Really?” Ryan had come over to sit beside him. Taken his hand. “I didn’t think you thought that way. I mean, not like I do.”

“I don’t. Or I never did.” John had run his free hand through his hair, ruffling it up. “I don’t know. I see him, and he’s trying so hard, he’s got that big heart, even after everything, and then he looks up at me and he says _yes, John_ , in that voice, when I ask him for something, and I just—I want to—”

“You want to take care of him,” Ryan said. “To make him feel good. Or maybe give him orders and put him over your knee and tell him to get off while you spank him, not hard—I know you wouldn’t hurt him—but enough so that he knows he’s yours, enough that that pretty ass turns all pink. And then you’d hold him after.”

“Oh, hell,” John said. “Yes. All of that. Everything, god, everything you just—and he’s fucking seventeen and still healing and he looks up to us—I can’t, we can’t, that’s not right. I’ve never wanted this before. I love you. I don’t know how to feel this. Do I love him too? I never thought I’d have—after Robbie, and then there was you, and now this—”

“You can,” Ryan had said, swinging a leg over his, settling into his lap, taking John’s face in his hands. “You can feel this. It’s not just you. I’m there too. The way he looked at me. Those damn eyes. That heart. I think—I think we might have to talk to him.”

John had fallen backward onto their bed. Thrown an arm over his eyes. “About what? He’s a kid. He shouldn’t have to think about—maybe he’d be better off staying with someone else—”

“We can offer to send him over to Tim,” Ryan had said, landing atop him and sticking his head under John’s despairing elbow, “but it’ll be up to him. Making that decision for himself. Also, if you were wondering, he’s turning eighteen next week. I asked, when I was updating our calendar and he came in to ask if he could bring over some books from his place. And he’s survived more than most people have. Even most of us. He’s not a kid.”

John had groaned. Ryan had kissed him.

And the following morning had been the tipping point anyway. Holiday had vanished after loading the dishwasher, and they’d started worrying after an hour or so and had gone looking. Ryan had found him first, sitting on the small rock-hewn balcony below the main observation windows; Holly had hastily attempted to pretend he’d not been crying.

When Ryan had put a hand on his shoulder and asked, Holly had tried to apologize, through tears, for wanting him, for wanting him and John, for the way he felt around them both. He’d tried to say he was sorry for making them uncomfortable, for being even more of a problem, for intruding on their love, because they did love each other, he could see that, he was almost fully recovered in any case, he should just go.

Ryan had stopped him there. Had yelled for John, who’d come running, medical kit clutched in one hand and fear about reopened wounds vivid in the whiteness of his face. Ryan had told Holly to say that first part again, about the wanting, about the way he felt near them, around them, when they told him he was good.

Holiday, wide-eyed and a bit damp from tears and ocean-spray, had stumbled through this confession a second time. John, kneeling beside him, had visibly melted. Ryan had put a hand on the back of John’s neck, put the other hand into Holly’s long loose hair, and tipped Holly’s head back for a kiss, and pulled John in to share.

John, it turned out, had strict scruples about sex and Holly’s eighteenth birthday. Ryan had rolled eyes at him but agreed because it was only a week. Holly had said, “Oh, but I’m not a virgin, Mother and Father hired tutors for me in everything, and I think I’m fairly good at sex? I mean, I know how to do quite a lot of things? And I can get my feet all the way behind my head.”

John had at this point gone off to take a very long cold shower. Ryan had buried his face in his hands and then resolutely taken on the task of explaining to a bewildered former supervillain-in-training why this was not the best approach to reassuring anxious partners.

In the present, in the kitchen, they found food. Gathered up bowls. Settled into the flavors of home: rich spices, melted cheese, decadent layers.

They mostly didn’t bother eating at the table, and tonight was no different; they wanted Holly tucked between them, easy to reach. This required a bit of arranging, back on the sofa, but they all had good balance and coordination. Holly ended up mostly on John’s lap, leaning back against him. They hadn’t bothered bringing him a bowl; John had said otherwise.

They took turns feeding him, instead.

Forkfuls and careful bites. Nibbles of garlic bread. Sips of water. Holly began looking drowsier, radiant and unfocused and compliant, as this went on. John kissed him a few times, nuzzling caresses into his hair, his ear, the side of his face. Holly murmured something wordless and let his head rest on John’s shoulder. Ryan gave him another bite. Holly parted lips obediently and took it.

“So good,” Ryan said, and set the fork down, and brushed a thumb over the corner of that mouth, collecting a stray bit of sauce, and pressed it to those lips. Holly licked it clean, eyes bright. “Our good boy.”

“You know you are,” John said, fondly. “Everything you do, how brave you are, and then coming home and letting us take care of you. Because you know how much we love that. No, we’re not getting up yet, you can wait. We’re going to hold you for a minute.”

Holly nodded again. The fire spilled light across his hair, across his cheek, over the spot where marks had all but disappeared. The television had turned itself into some sort of beachside house-hunting show. Ryan wasn’t listening. He stroked a hand along Holly’s leg, up that thigh; he explored slim muscles and the line of that hip under stretchy cozy fabric, and encountered the stiff hot line of Holly’s cock, fat with desire.

Holly let out a little yearning noise. John said, “Shh,” and ran a hand over his hair. “Stay still.” Ryan played with him more, sneaking the hand beneath clothing: no rhythm, nothing to predict, only lazy unhurried fondling of his rigid length, his balls, back up to the tip, where a drop of wetness followed fingers. Holly twitched, tried to behave and stay in place, clung to John.

They held him. They held each other, moving together. The night unfolded leisurely, no rush.

After a while John leaned over to kiss Ryan, deliberate and inviting and delicious. He tasted a little like tomato sauce and a little like the eucalyptus touch of his inhaler, medicinal and dry. Ryan liked that reminder—John was here and doing fine—and kissed back readily, nibbling at John’s lower lip, letting John’s tongue tease his mouth. Holiday watched them, wide-eyed and supported by John’s arm, breathing faster.

Ryan laughed. “You like watching us, don’t you?”

Holly’s lips shaped the yes, all lit up with enthusiasm plus the strokes of Ryan’s hand over his cock. His hair got into his face. John tucked it back. “You want to take this to the bedroom? Better toys.”

“Hmm.” Ryan considered this. “You think he can walk? All that healing, and also I’m distracting him, and he looks pretty far under already, all sweet and submissive. I don’t know.”

Holly blinked at him, figured out his own role in this dialogue, and said, small but sincere, “I’m fine, sir, I can walk.”

“That does remind me,” John said. “What you said earlier, kid. You said you _think_ you’d tell us. If you got hurt.”

“I said I would,” Holly objected, but meekly. “I will. It was only—for a minute I felt—but I know why it’s important. I promise.”

“I believe you.” John curled the hand around his throat again, not cutting off air but providing pressure. “But I think you need a reminder. About belonging to us. So you remember to tell us everything. Sound fair?”

Holly had apparently forgotten how to talk. Likely the fault of that hand. Or Ryan’s flick of fingers against his cock.

“Yes,” he finally managed. “I mean, yes, sirs. What did you have in mind?”

“You want to know?” John glanced over his head at Ryan, who shrugged and said, “Up to him, but I’m not sure he gets a say.” This was untrue; Holly could always say no or stop or red or yellow, slow down, wait. They’d established that early on. Incontrovertible. No forging ahead without it.

“I was thinking about spanking you,” John mused, drumming fingers over vulnerable breath and blood, “but then again you showed up with those cuts, and I’m not sure I want you face-down, over my knee or on the bed, putting weight on that…”

“But I’m fine!”

“Yeah…I don’t know, though.” He paused, nudged Holly’s chin up. “Not because I think you’re lying, I know you’re not, you wouldn’t. Because I don’t like seeing you hurt.”

Ryan raised eyebrows. Murmured, “Sometimes I do. When you ask us for it. When it feels good.”

“Everything feels clear,” Holly said. “Like flying. Like—like being weightless, except anchored, because you’re my anchors. But I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to, either.” He met John’s eyes first, but turned that wide woodsprite gaze to Ryan as well. “I want to feel whatever you want to make me feel. I love that. Being that much yours. Especially when…” He hesitated, finished, “Especially right now. Please.”

“I know,” John breathed back, fingers loosely holding his chin. “I know. We love you.”

“I think,” Ryan said, hand getting tighter around Holly’s pretty cock, enough of a grip to earn a gasp, “I’ve got an idea.”

They tumbled into the bedroom—their bedroom—together, trading kisses and caresses and laughter. Ryan stepped on John’s foot once. John, carrying Holly, got closer to him and backed him up against the wall until they ran out of space, bodies meeting, aroused and expectant. Ryan said, “You might be bigger, but I’m more flexible,” and wrapped a leg around John’s. Holly’s rainclouds played melodies across stone and glass and oceans, surrounding their home, drenching the world in silvery song.

Their bedroom held laundry baskets and thick island-weather blankets. It kept safe several of Holly’s current books on infamous historical duels and scandals, plus John’s favorite old leather belt, coiled innocuously by the bedside. It protected Robbie’s dog tags, in a closed box—not hidden away, not dismissed, but put away and quietly approving—on one of the carved-out rock shelves. That shelf space also contained a ridiculous plush bear that John had bought when Ryan had first moved in. The bear wore a cape and a mask, and clutched a tiny sign in both paws that said _I’m super-glad you’re here!_ John had put him on top of one of the last moving-boxes for Ryan to find; Ryan had said, “That is literally the world’s most _super_ -terrible pun,” because his new partner was clearly a tremendously muscular sentimental dork and also because his chest felt weirdly flutteringly pleased at the thought.

That shelf also held a miniature sketch of him and John, caught laughing at something in the kitchen, himself with miniscule lightning-bolts at the fingertips of one gesturing hand, John’s eyes captured in the act of adoring him. That piece told a story in lyrical black ink, hand-drawn. Holly was a more than decent artist—those relentless lessons in aristocratic perfection at work—and had offered it to them shyly on the three-month anniversary of them all being a them. He’d included himself in the scene, unobtrusive and pixie-sized and sitting on the lower corner of the countertop where ink-lines blurred into ragged edges. Tiny Holly was hugging one knee to his chest, letting one long leg dangle, and smiling at them both.

They hadn’t known he could draw. He didn’t, not often. But sometimes.

Their bed took up most of the room. Heroic capacity. Nice and sturdy. Plush and firm. Opulent thread counts. Thick carved headboard, dark wood over reinforced heaviness. Drawers underneath. Lots of those toys.

John tossed Holly into bed—Holly landed amid blanket-hills and a fortress of pillows, which merrily scattered themselves, and lay there smiling—and pulled off his own shirt and threw it vaguely at the laundry basket and got hands into the waist of Ryan’s pajama pants. “You have too many clothes on. So do I.”

“You can help with that—”

John did. With alacrity. Holly, having pushed himself up on both elbows, gazed at them. Licked lips, a half-unconscious swipe of tongue over pink skin.

“Mmm,” John said, on both knees, nuzzling at the crease of Ryan’s hip, lips brushing his cock. “You taste good. All clean and warm.”

“I probably taste like your soap.” He ran a hand through John’s hair, felt his own heart ache with love: clear as firelight, transparent as water. “No overexertion. Go lie down. In bed.”

John let out a huff of amusement, gave him an ironic half-salute, and went. Once there he tugged Holly upright and peeled that oversized sweater off and then rolled him back into pillows and eased down his pants and expensive clinging underwear and left him naked, cuddled under super-soldier warmth, being kissed.

Ryan appreciated this sight for a moment—Holly’s tumbled hair and slim grace and John’s powerful hands and large body pinning him down—and then joined them. His body throbbed with desire; those desires collected and collided. A need to take care of both his partners. A need to lose himself in them. A need to race forward, chasing his heart, to the brink.

He ran a hand over Holly’s chest, over that flat stomach. He could make out the lines of the two deepest cuts if he tried, knowing where they’d been. Even that’d be gone soon.

Holly shivered, caught between them. Gazing up at him. Waiting. Yielding.

John’s hand snuck between those long legs. One finger trailed over slick desire, gathering it from the tip, then came up and pushed into Holly’s mouth: making him taste his own need. Holly licked at traces of himself obediently. His eyes grew wider, darker, falling into capitulation and trust. Anchors, he’d said. Making him feel.

Making _them_ feel. Because they did. Right there with him.

John glanced over at Ryan; Ryan guessed they were thinking along the same lines, as usual, and gave him the head-tip of agreement. John sat up more, back against the headboard; he coaxed Holly’s head into his lap, and gently nudged until his erection pressed against that mouth. Holly promptly parted lips and took him in, that whole massive length and girth, John’s large hand at the back of his head guiding him into place. John told him how good he was, how gorgeous, taking it; Holly sighed and relaxed even more, pliant and contented, mouth kept full.

Ryan said to him, “I did say I had an idea, and you’re going to feel it.” Holly murmured something undecipherable around John’s cock, languid. John’s hand tightened in his hair.

Ryan grinned. Reached out to the universe. Gathered up fiery pinpoints of light: leaping specks that bound elements together. He’d always been able to feel them.

Right now he wanted the lightest possible touch. A hum of electricity, not real hurt.

He let the power purr at his fingertips.

He brushed fingers over the delicate expanse of Holly’s inner thigh.

Holly gasped, choked on John’s cock—John held him in place, shoved a thumb into his mouth too, stretching those lips wider—and whimpered, frantic and begging. His cock jumped, twitched, smeared wetness over his stomach.

John let him up to breathe. Ryan said, “More?”

“Please,” Holly moaned, hips shifting, begging, “please, yes, yes—it feels—you feel so—please—”

Ryan laughed. John got his head back into place, mouth occupied, devoutly suckling at John’s cock. Ryan called more coruscation up to the surface. Got back to petting him with it. Those twin pert nipples. His thighs. Eventually, agonizingly slow and electric and ecstatic, the line of his cock. The twin drawn-up weights below.

Holly wailed and trembled and tried to come on the spot and tried not to come, hips jerking off the bed. They hadn’t given him permission, so he did not come, after all; Ryan bent down and kissed his stomach, over the last of those lingering lines. “Be good, kid. We know you need to get off. We know you want to. We know you’re feeling really, really good right now. But you’re going to wait until we say. And I think you should take care of John first, don’t you? Since he’s being so nice to you.”

John raised eyebrows. Ryan shrugged. The words didn’t matter as much as the tone, the commands, the affirmation.

He lunged over to grab the closest lube from the bedside drawer. Strawberry-flavored, this one. It made him want to laugh: helplessly, foolishly, stupidly in love with Holly’s indulgences, with John’s considerate shopping purchases.

He worked fingers, slippery with lube, back between spread thighs; he slid them into the curves of that luscious backside, found the beckoning furl of muscle, made that slippery too. He did not want to hurt Holly in ways unintended; they’d never, ever do that.

Of course they had, indirectly, tonight. His heart lurched at this comprehension and tried to twist itself into a knot. They hadn’t been the ones slicing blades into fragile skin or self-esteem, no. But they’d let Holly go in and play spy. Knowing what could happen, knowing what might happen. And he’d come out hurt.

He made himself breathe.

John’s spare hand, the one not carefully directing Holly’s ministrations in his lap, reached over. Found Ryan’s shoulder. Traced a heart, lopsided because John could never not draw lopsided hearts, over his bicep.

Ryan looked up. Both his partners were looking at him.

Holly, John’s cock resting sticky over lips, curled more onto one side for a better view, and smiled. John said, low and bedrock-sure, “We love you,” and tugged at Holly’s hair, enough to prompt a whimper, without looking away: all three of them together in that instant. Might’ve been either of their hands in Holly’s hair; might’ve been anyone’s voice that whispered the yes.

He breathed out, “I love you,” to them both. To reinforce the words, pushed two fingers inside: abrupt but slick with lube, just the side of harshness that’d be exactly right, making Holly’s whole body ripple and clench in response.

Good. More.

The scent of strawberries. The patter of rain. Their voices, murmurs of praise and adoration. The sounds of John’s cock thrusting into Holly’s pretty mouth, of Ryan’s fingers—three, now—working inside him. Holly shuddered all over, abandoned to sensation, rocking amid the waves of everything they did to him, for him, for all of them.

John watched Ryan’s fingers. Stroked Holly’s cheek. “Kid? You still with us?”

Holly moaned faintly, which wasn’t quite a yes, but he did manage to nod, despite the blurry rapture in those eyes.

“You want a little more?”

This time Ryan said, “Are you sure,” mostly out of reflex. John said, “I’ve got something in mind, and it’ll be nice, he’ll like it, I just want to make sure he knows how much we love him. Feeling it.”

“Well,” Ryan said, “okay, if he says so,” and bent down to check Holly’s awareness, coherence, consent. “Color, kid? Green, yellow, red?”

“Green…please…” Hazy but present; okay, then. That was a yes. “More?”

“Yeah,” Ryan said aloud, acknowledging this, “okay. More. And thank you, thank you for answering, that was good.”

“Only a little,” John promised, “I know you’re tired, but you can handle this,” and a small line of concentration formed between his eyebrows.

John Trent, alias Sundown, had picked up that call sign for a reason. Robbie Rivers had gotten minor telekinesis, the physical version. John could create illusions. Temporary and localized, but nevertheless: he could bring down darkness, hide a presence, craft mirages out of thin air, trick eyes and senses into feeling what he wanted them to feel.

This time the night became feathers, light and billowy as snowfall, skimming all over Holly’s trembling flushed body. They formed a tantalizing fluttering counterpoint to sharper electric flares; Ryan wanted to applaud the choice, and instead adjusted the angle and pressed more crackling light right into that particular place, buried deep.

Holly quivered everyplace under the onslaught, and began to cry: not hard, not offering any hand signals or pulling away or asking to stop, simply overwhelmed and thoroughly surrendered to bliss.

John groaned. Bent further over him. Thrust harder into his mouth, his throat. Holly’s eyes fell shut, then opened halfway, drowned in pleasure. Ryan stroked him inside and out, fingers teasing that spot and teasing his cock, and told him, “Once John comes you can.”

John swore out loud, groaned Ryan’s name, gasped Holly’s, plunged even deeper, all the way down—and came, gasping, muscles taut, beautiful in release.

Holly swallowed, tried to swallow more, and abruptly was coming too: given permission and taken apart by exaltation, by the crest of John’s climax, by the kiss of feathers and the shock of sparks. He came in a drawn-out exquisite spill of white, pulse after pulse, quaking and soundless at the height of relief.

That sight set off fires along Ryan’s spine, into his gut, through his own neglected arousal; he needed to plunge into all that sweetness, needed to feel Holly and John, around him and beside him. He ached with waiting, with wanting, like bittersweet glorious gold.

He eased fingers out of Holly. Holly moaned, malleable as candlewax, lax and languorous. John caught breath as well, panting, slipping himself out of that exhausted lovely mouth. Ryan spared him a mock-stern glance; John waved a hand, said, “I’m okay,” and rearranged them so that he was on one side cradling Holly, who remained tear-streaked but dreamy and peaceful and pliant as honey: someplace far-off and wreathed with rainbows, submissive and incandescent.

Ryan knelt between those sprawled-out long legs, admired the splashes of release across Holly’s chest and stomach, and moved lower, atop him, letting Holly feel his weight. Kissed those parted lips, tasting John, tasting them both. John put a hand on his back. Ryan whispered, “Want me inside you, kid? Holly?” and Holly whispered back, “Yes, sir, please,” drowsy but definite about this, trying to spread legs even more.

Ryan laughed, felt the yes pierce his heart like Holly’s raindrops—cleansing, annealing—and sank home inside him.

Holiday, already slick and open and hot—and Ryan had done that, had been the one to do that, his hands, his caresses bringing ecstasy—felt like a fantasy, a dream, one that knew how to move and arch and tighten to bring even more pleasure. John’s hand rested on Ryan’s back, and their legs brushed; John was strength and kindness and terrible puns and tender care, and Ryan loved him and loved Holly and loved their world, this world, them together—

Petals tumbled across his cheek, his shoulder, his hip. Roses. An illusion. A shower of them, vanishing, just enough to leave an impression. The one that fell onto Holly’s shoulder bore a hint of thorns—Ryan could see them—and that held a message: Holly dissolved into molten sugar at intensity and loved the deployment of roughness, and John normally didn’t, not as much, and the thorns were only illusory and mostly blunt.

But they were enough to be felt.

Holly gasped and arched up under him, eyes faraway and luminous. Ryan took him harder, faster, a pounding rhythm because he couldn’t help it, swept up in the tides. John ordered, voice low beside Holly’s ear, “If you can, kid, come again for us,” and kissed his cheek as Ryan bent to kiss him too, so their mouths met, tumultuous and clumsy and overjoyed—

Ryan moved once more, one final plunge, and all at once that was it, unstoppable and splendid, gathering up and rushing out and breaking him apart like a splintering of crystals, white-hot and dazzling and poignant. He thought Holly came too, a desperate cry and a clenching and a final spurt of release between them; his vision shimmered for a moment.

Surprised, he touched his own cheek, coming back to earth. Damp. Had he been crying?

John put arms around them both. Held on. Smothered a cough in a handy nearby pillow. Ryan fumbled fuzzily around. Threw the inhaler at him.

They lay entangled, listening to breaths and heartbeats and the rain. John found a sheet with his toes and pulled it up; they’d both noticed that Holly’s skin felt a bit cold. Ryan got closer on the other side, keeping their worn-out youngest third defended against chilly temperatures. John traced another lopsided heart on his back. Ryan stuck a foot through both his partners' ankles.

After a while he pushed himself up on an elbow. Brushed hair out of Holly’s face, beside one shut eye. “Holly?”

“I’m awake,” Holly said, though he sounded only marginally so. “I feel…that was…”

“Good?”

The eye opened, followed by the other. “Good isn’t enough. I don’t know. Miraculous. Marvelous. Tired. Like some sort of confectionary, all pink and fluffy and weightless. Was that…was it, for you…I love you. So much. I’m yours.”

“Mmm,” John said, and bit his shoulder. “Delicious.”

“We’re great.” Ryan dropped a kiss on his nose. “That was perfect. You’re good, you’re always good, but that was…you feel fucking amazing, Holly, and you make us feel amazing, and you’re ours and you’re perfect. Even if you have the weirdest metaphors. Pink and fluffy? Confectionary? Is that like whipped cream?”

“It could be.” Holly yawned. “Give me a few moments. Then we can talk about whips.”

“No,” John corrected, “not tonight. Maybe in a day or two. You’re recovering. How do you feel about bookshelves? Big ones.”

“As are you,” Holly grumbled, kicking him, but lightly. “I appreciate bookshelves. Which you know. Was that a general question about furniture preferences, or did you have something specific in mind?”

“Thinking about putting more in here,” Ryan informed him, catching that foot and trapping it under his own. “We’ll need more. If you’re moving in.”

“If I—” Holly went quiet, lying between them, turning that huge gaze from Ryan to John and back. That unremoved smudge of eyeliner—more smudged now, Ryan noticed with smugness—lingered, highlighting his left eye.

“We want you to,” John said. “It’s time. And you said yourself there’s not anything big on the horizon, nothing we need you to infiltrate, and—”

“But I’m helping!” Holly’s voice cracked: not in a good way. “I’ve—am I not, has it not been—is it not enough, I can do more, I can be more useful—”

“You can,” Ryan interrupted, hand finding his wrist, encircling it, squeezing. “You’ve done a lot. So much. Seriously. You stopped Code Blue that time, you sent us to Moon Labs before the break-in happened, tonight you told us about Blade’s plans for Tim—”

“But you want me to stop!”

“We want you here with us,” John said, and Holly looked at his face, at the emotion laid bare and raw, and stopped talking.

“We want you here,” John said again. “You—it’s not just about you. Or it is but not like that. This is—we’re dying a little bit every day you go in there, kid, and tonight you came out hurt, and we can’t—it’s not worth that. It’s not.”

“It’s not like you’re going to stop being useful,” Ryan said. “It’s—you’re going to be useful _with_ us. Right next to us. In the open. We can tell the world. Holiday Jones the hero.”

“But,” Holly pleaded, “I’m not.”

“Yes you are!” Ryan and John retorted simultaneously.

Holly blinked at them twice, a baby deer astounded by vehemence, and then a third time.

The tension broke into a million hysterical pieces, sex-giddy and shaken and astonished by a future.

“I’m not,” Holly said eventually, not a protest but a wish having to do with the world’s perception, with his own perception, “but…I could be? If you think…I mean, am I? A—a hero? One of you.”

“You’re always one of us,” John agreed, wrapping them both up into long arms. “But you’re a hero too. The best of us, we said.”

“Also you can finally meet my parents,” Ryan pointed out. “They’ll adore you. My dad’ll ask you all _kinds_ of questions about quantum physics and your mystic portals. My mom will restock our infirmary with whatever she decides your particular needs are. Like she did for John. And they’ll both say you’re too thin and try to feed you your body weight in soup. I’m warning you now.”

“I…might not mind soup?” Holly said, cautious as hope, as a daydream of family.

John’s stomach made a noise.

“Super-soldiers and your damn appetites,” Ryan said in mock annoyance, “now’s not the time,” and tried to figure out how to kick him without disturbing Holly.

“I can’t help it! We were talking about food!”

“I like your…appetites,” Holly offered, eyes dancing, suspiciously damp at the edges again. “And—and I do like bookshelves. Big ones. If I’m officially moving in.”

John burst out laughing, and kissed him. And then leaned over him to pull Ryan into all the kissing too. “More food in a few minutes. Cuddling first. Both of you.”

“No arguments here,” Ryan said, freeing a piece of Holly’s hair from his mouth, “as long as you’re both okay. Do either of you need anything? Water, healing salve, a new set of lungs?"

John made a face at him. “I’ll be fine tomorrow!”

“Tomorrow’s not now. What did I say about calling my mother? I meant it.”

“We’re fine,” Holly said softly, “and we’ll be fine tomorrow, too. I mean—I think we are. All of us. Together. Whatever happens now. I love you.”

“We love you.” Ryan draped a leg over his. Let certainty stretch out and fill up the room: yes, this, a future. Painted in lightning and magic, roses and rain. “Rest, you two.”

“Ten minutes,” John said. “And then we should have food. And clean up. And make sure you, kid, stay hydrated and warm.”

“Yes, please,” Holly said, and yawned once more, safe and sound between them.

The bedroom got extra-cozy, sated and satisfied. In ten minutes they’d get up and find food and take care of Holly and each other some more; they’d hold each other and trade kisses and make plans for bringing Holly’s books and focus-stone artifacts and elaborate mystic robes to Clifftop, across upcoming days and weeks. They’d work out new training routines and strategies, the three of them coordinating in the field; they’d have to explain Holly’s apparent changing of sides to other heroes, and face what’d be some very angry much-betrayed Masters of Terror.

Nothing they couldn’t handle, Ryan thought, breathing in yet another stray bit of Holly’s hair, sticking his face into dark waves. Nothing the three of them couldn’t handle.

Maybe they’d even plant John’s garden when they got a chance. They could watch zucchini grow, or in Holly’s case poke it with magic.

He said, to the night and the bedroom and his partners, “I was thinking.”

“Hmm?” John at least was awake; Holly was too, a second later, a sleepy rumpled black-haired kitten with big hazel eyes. “About food? There’s also chocolate ice cream.”

“No,” Ryan said. “I mean, yeah, sure, totally in favor of dessert foods, we should feed Holly something sweet, but. My name.”

“Huh? Oh—Beacon. Right. You weren’t sure. Said it sounded like a lighthouse. Any other ideas?”

“Actually,” Ryan said, “I was thinking I don’t mind lighthouses, they guide people home, that’s not a bad thing. Coming home. Maybe I’ll, y’know. Keep this one.”

“Oh,” John said. “Oh. You—yes. Yeah, it’s—I kind of like it too.” Holly’s eyes sparkled.

“We’ll see,” Ryan said. His toes were warm, brushing John’s calf; his body was warm, curved around Holly’s, both of them under John’s arm. “But…yeah. I’ll hang on to it for a while. I like how that sounds.”


End file.
